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white as wool, ancient of days. At others, speaking quietly, almost inaudibly, and looking at the black-and-white chequered floor beneath his feet, he had almost a bedraggled look, to which the slightly musty, frayed quality of his gown contributed. And at others still, he reminded William briefly of Portuguese missionary friars he had met, out there, with feverish eye and ravaged faces, men who failed to comprehend the incomprehension of the placidly evasive Indians. And this analogy in turn would make William, sitting in the English stonelight on his hard bench, remember other ceremonies, the all-male gatherings to drink
caapi
, or
Aya-huasca
, the Dead Man’s Vine. He had tried it once and had seen visions of landscapes and great cities and lofty towers as though he were flying, had found himself lost in a forest surrounded by serpents, and in danger of death. Women were not allowed to taste these things, or to see the drums which summoned the participants, the
botutos
, on pain of death. He remembered the fleeing women, faces covered, sitting amongst the decorous English family, men on one side, women on another, watching Eugenia’spink tongue moisten her soft lips. He felt he was doomed to a kind of double consciousness. Everything he experienced brought up its contrary image from
out there
, which had the effect of making not only the Amazon ceremonies but the English sermon seem strange, unreal, of an uncertain nature. He had smuggled away a
botuto
under blankets, in a canoe at night, but it was lost with all his other things, under the miles of grey water. Perhaps it had brought him ill-luck.
    ‘We must never cease to be thankful to the Lord for all his many mercies to us,’ said Harald Alabaster.
    A workshop was set up for William in a disused saddle-room, next to the stables. This was half-full of the tin boxes, the wooden crates, the tea-chests of things Harald had purchased—apparently with no clear priority of interest—from all over the world. Here were monkey skins and delicate parrot skins, preserved lizards and monstrous snakes, box upon box of dead beetles, brilliant green, iridescent purple, swarthy demons with monstrous horned heads. Here too were crates of geological specimens, and packs of varied mosses, fruits and flowers, from the Tropics and the ice-caps, bears’ teeth and rhinoceros horns, the skeletons of sharks and clumps of coral. Some packages proved to have been reduced to drifting dust by the action of termites, or compacted to viscous dough by the operation of mould. William asked his benefactor on what principle he was required to proceed, and Harald told him, ‘Set it all in order, don’t you know? Make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other.’ William came to see that Harald had not carried out this task himself partly at least because he had no real idea of how to set about it. He felt moments of real irritability that treasures for which men like himself had risked life and health should lie here higgledy-piggledy, and decay in an English stable. He procured a trestle-table and several ledgers, a series of collecting cabinets and some cupboards for specimens that would not lie flat and slide conveniently in and out of drawers. He set up his microscope, and began to makelabels. He moved things from day to day from drawer to drawer as he found himself with a plethora of beetles or a sudden plague of frogs. He could not devise an organising principle, but went on doggedly making labels, setting up, examining.
    His saddle-room was dark, and stone-cold, except where the light came in from the window, which was high up, too high to look out of. He worked amongst the noise and smells of the grooms mucking out the stables, the steaming scent of dung, the ammoniac whiff of horse-piss, the plod of leather boots, the swish of hay on a fork. Edgar and Lionel were both keen horsemen. Edgar kept an Arab stallion, a gleaming chestnut with a silky-muscled, arching neck and eyes that